NNNNN x Telegrafía: Cedrik Fermont with Khabat Abas & Hardi Kurda

Cedrik Fermont is an artist with Belgian, Congolese and Greek descent based in Berlin. He studied declamation, theatre improvisation, and electroacoustic music in Belgium. Since 1989, he has been actively involved in the realms of noise, electronic, and experimental music as a composer, musician, mastering engineer, author, radio host, concert organiser, independent researcher, and label manager at Syrphe, a label and platform founded in 2002, mostly dedicated to electronic, experimental and free improvised music from Asia and Africa. He is a member of groups such as Axiome, Tasjiil Moujahed, and has lent his compositions to sound installations, theatrical performances, and choreographies. He was guest curator at GEIGER Septemberfest 2022 in Gothenburg, Sweden, gave composition workshops at the Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music and was guest lecturer in numerous universities.

http://syrphe.com/c-drik.html

Khabat Abas is an experimental, improviser, cellist,  and composer from Kurdistan-Iraq who likes to break the rules; she experiments with the cello structurally and musically, improvising, composing, doing a sound installation, creating diverse cellos, and using her own body. Her composition is a tool to amplify voiceless stories and use diverse materials to protest against oppressions rooted in social and political systems. She questions what is out of bounds, that raises the possibilities of sounds that contrast with traditional musical values and cannot be controlled. Khabat has performed with various ensembles, including the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, Sulaymaniyah String orchestra, Gothenburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, and the Non-Ensemble for experimental music in Sweden, London Improvisation Orchestra and ONe_Orchestra New, Noise women. She is co-founder of Duo Moment; together with Hardi Kurda, they released two albums, “Broken Resonance” on Space21 Label and “Illegal Performance” at Café Oto 2021.

https://khabatabas.com/

Composer, sound artist, improviser, researcher, and curator Hardi Kurda, is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. Hardi’s compositions involve suggestive and unusual sounds using, among others, the radio to explore spectrum frequency as sound material. Besides composing classical acoustic and electronic music, Hardi Kurda develops pieces in which music interacts with different art forms in new art spaces to create new listening experiences using found scores, a new listening medium he develops. His works were performed in Irtijal International Festival for Improvisation Music in Beirut, Adapter ensemble Berliner Festspiele MaerzMusik, “Sound Place” exhibition and ShowRoom in London. Hardi has received commissions from the Department of Public Art in Gothenburg, the Swedish Art Council, and Goethe Institute, for works including his project “The Illegal Performance”. Hardi’s latest works The Magnified Face, the found score of Kurdish carpet, have been performed telepathically with Jennifer Walshe, Tomomi Adachi inspiration from John Heartfield found footage organised by ADK in Berlin, curated by Julia Gerlach. Hardi is a founder and curator of Space21 for Sound Art and Experimental Music in Kurdistan-Iraq, two editions of the festival were co-curated with the artist and writer Brandon LaBelle. In (2020) he became the fifth scholarship holder of the Radio Art Residency in Halle, Germany where he created two experimental radio performances: Listening Urgency, the found score of radio and Everything illegal, the found score of illegal stories, performed with Nina Guo, curated by Tina Klatte.

https://hardikurda.com/